


The Way

by karanguni



Category: Táng Cháo | Tang Dynasty RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Sort Of, Wuxia, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 19:14:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17127155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: Wine called, and Du Fu knew better than not to listen to her summons. He went inside, and there beheld a spectacular vision.





	The Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lnhammer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lnhammer/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I was fascinated by your prompt of _youxia_ poets running around - so here's a little vigilantism in the time of the decaying Tang for you.
> 
> Many thanks to Prinz for the beta.

[...] I badly need the Great Elixir’s ingredients,  
in mountain forests all my traces have been swept away.  
Lord Li was a luminary of the golden chambers,  
he escaped to pursue his arcane research.  
I too will undertake travels in Liang and Song  
expecting to gather the yao plant.

Du Fu, _Presented to Li Bai_

* * *

Du Fu sat in contemplation on the banks of the Yellow River. He was sober; the sun above sent lances of light reflecting off of the water, forcing him to squint. It was a bad morning for poetry and so a good morning for the subject at hand: taxes.

The landscape of sleepy Luoyang drowsed all around him. Late birds were still singing in the trees, their voices harmonising with the river's low and constant hum. Distantly, Du Fu could hear the clamour of a market coming to life in the village square a few _li_ south. Stall-owners shouted; men bargained.

Du Fu pondered his current quandary. It was a multi-faceted problem: the townspeople had raised a complaint against their local magistrate, citing falsification of tax payments as his crime. Du Fu had been assigned the duty of serving as a neutral arbitrator for the whole affair.

Problems like these, he knew, had to be managed carefully. Other officials who had come before him had already failed to find fault in the magistrate's bookkeeping, but the wrath of the people was hard to ignore - as was the difficulty of their situation. A blind man would know it from the uneven tread of the muddy streets and from the roughness of the clothing on their sun-beaten backs.

The magistrate was, Du Fu acknowledged, a man skilled with a brush: his calligraphy was as good as his extraordinary ability to obfuscate and confuse the otherwise clearly written ledgers. This was a crime of competent administration: adherence to the Emperor Xuangzong's laws, but not to their intent. Clever administration, but unwise and ungracious.

Du Fu sighed. _Farewell, river_ , he thought: _it is to the mountains - mountains of paper - which I must return._

* * *

These were mountains of madness, Du Fu decided a few days later. He had come to Hu village to right wrongs, not to become ensnared in them.

 _The equal-field system permits the increase of taxes of..._ , opined the magistrate in a footnote to the ledger which recorded a flabbergasting levy on last season's harvest.

'Would that it also permitted the removal of your right hand, to prevent you from writing something so confounding ever again,' bemoaned Du Fu to the sheaf of official records in his hands. One year's audit was done: there were many more to go, but what faint hope he'd had of finding sloppy bookkeeping was growing faint.

Someone made a polite noise and then entered his room. Du Fu looked up to find the magistrate himself being obliging.

'Would you like a bit of breakfast, sir?' the magistrate asked, and brought in a tray - glossily lacquered and too beautiful for mere breakfast - filled to overflowing with small eats and hot tea.

Du Fu declined to indulge even after the magistrate excused himself: there was no worse poison than the slow acclimatisation to life's middling pleasures.

* * *

He found nothing sufficiently damning on the fourth and then fifth days of his audit. Du Fu declined dinner that evening to walk the village instead; outside of the magistrate's sumptuous house, he could see things for what they truly were.

It was a humid autumn evening and somewhat chilly. The village and the surrounding fields and small groves of trees were blanketed in a low-hanging fog that sheathed everything in milky whiteness. Du Fu let sounds, not sight, direct him towards a small inn that lay nearly on the very outskirts of the town. Warm lamp light cast hazy orange and yellow halos beyond the rough-made windows of the building. From inside, there came raucous laughter and the sounds of cups hitting tabletops.

Wine called, and Du Fu knew better than not to listen to her summons. He went inside, and there beheld a spectacular vision.

'I have not worked a day in my life, not properly,' sang a drunk itinerant stranger at a crowded table. 'I am the very filth that many of you so rightfully despise: I am vain!' He swigged from his cup. 'I am careless!' Another swig. 'I am irresponsible! And yet -'

The drunk pointed at his audience, fingers still curled around his cup as he swung around to encompass them all. 'And _yet_ , that is why you all also love me, because at least I am an honest man.'

The poet took a bow, staggering slightly as he did so. And the man _was_ a poet, Du Fu knew, even if no one else in the room did: his drunken paean had perfect poetic metre, solid classical form.

'Sir,' Du Fu said to the drunkard, reaching into his sleeves for a brush and something to write on.

'Sir yourself,' the man replied, spinning to meet him. 'Did I offend you there, Official...?'

'Du Fu is my name,' Du Fu pronounced, sitting at an empty table and quickly writing. 'You did not offend me.'

'Then I, Li Bai, must try harder!' cried the poet. Du Fu's brush stuttered momentarily at the name; ink bled and marred one of his characters. Li Bai, God of Wine, grinned at him. 'I have escaped from my golden shackles at Hanlin - I need them not. Could I help you hack away at yours, Official Du?' He plucked at Du Fu's clothing.

Du Fu was acutely aware of the townsfolk in the room watching him. He inhaled once, deeply, then exhaled and said, formally, 'As a matter of fact, you may.' Du Fu took the sheet he'd written on and handed it to Li Bai. 'In exchange for transcribing your poem, shall we say?'

Li Bai squinted at Du Fu's neatly rendered lines. 'If you are as square as your characters,' he declared, 'it would be a _public service_ to loosen you up.' Still, he folded the poem up and vanished it into a pocket.

Du Fu watched Li Bai reach for a new container of wine. He poured them both a cup, and together they toasted making each other's acquaintance. Du Fu was only halfway through his when Li Bai slammed down his own cup, thundered 'So how _exactly_ may I help you, Official Du?', then toppled over onto the floor, dead-drunk unconscious.

* * *

Du Fu took Li Bai back to his temporary lodgings. After a night of sleep and a vigorous bath, Li Bai emerged clean in his dirty clothes and ate his way through Du Fu's morning meal before declaring he had no money with which to repay the good treatment.

'Repay me in advice instead,' Du Fu said eagerly. He had heard of Li Bai - of his genius and also his perilous time at and subsequent exile from court. 'You are widely read in the Five Classics and Four Books -'

'Yet just as wildly unqualified,' said Li Bai, who had - it was true - never taken an imperial examination in his life.

'You are well-connected in high places -'

'And yet utterly disinterested in calling in favours from bureaucrats,' said Li Bai, who looked ready to eat and drink his host out of his own home.

'You are crazy,' said Du Fu, finally.

'Yes,' Li Bai agreed.

'Deranged and impolite,' Du Fu continued. 'Irresponsible and careless: yet that is why you are well loved, because you tell the truth when others cannot. The truth is that the magistrate of this village wants to beggar his own people, but I do not know how to say it out loud.' Du Fu pointed at the piles of paper on his desk; the uselessly correct records. 'I cannot prove it.'

Li Bai chewed on a dumpling. 'No one needs to prove a true thing,' he declared. 'It wouldn't be true otherwise.'

Du Fu opened and closed his mouth, not knowing what to say. He watched as Li Bai got up and looked through the papers, huffing and snorting and going ' _very_ good, _very_ good' at choice parts.

When Li Bai grew tired of reading, Du Fu asked, 'What do you think?'

'I cannot help Official Du,' Li Bai pronounced as gave up on the papers. He rooted around the room, and found a bottle of wine. The magistrate had provisioned his auditor well. 'Poet Du, on the other hand, I might.'

Du Fu looked at the bottle and the cups. 'Poet Du is currently missing,' he admits. 'Whereabouts unknown.'

'Then we must find him,' Li Bai declared, and poured them both a round.

* * *

The moon was high and round and bright that evening. Du Fu lay on the floor, drunk and eyes heavy-lidded, and gazed up at it through his window.

'In a house with a thousand times ten thousand rooms containing a thousand times ten thousand government officials,' he posited to Li Bai, who was himself sprawled out a little ways away, 'how many do you think would be found honest?'

'That is a trick question,' Li Bai laughed. 'Because each official would have taken at _least_ five rooms for himself, and so the numbers would have been doctored from the very beginning.'

'Surely there are _some_ who truly want to help the people,' Du Fu protested. 'Surely there are _some_ whom you'd consider good men.'

'The name is the thing itself,' Li Bai postulated, finishing the last of their fifth bottle by drinking from the vessel directly. 'The name "official", in this age, now means someone corrupt. You cannot change a rotten system by being a part of it. Official Du - you must not live with animals, otherwise you become an animal yourself.'

'Oh,' Du Fu said. 'But then I would have no place to live at all.'

'What's wrong with that?' Li Bai asked.

'The world is cold and harsh,' Du Fu pointed out.

Li Bai considered the room's brazier, which was now burning warm but low. 'Warm it up, then, Official Du,' the man declared. 'Abandon titles, abandon names, abandon everything and follow your own way.' Getting up, Li Bai retrieved the magistrate's papers, and fed them to the coals until they were all ash.

Du Fu did not stop him; it all felt like a dream.

'There are many stacks of records,' he said eventually, watching yet another sheet catch alight and then crumble to nothing. 'I think you may need some help.'

* * *

The next morning, the magistrate found them still in Du Fu's room, nursing headaches and clear consciences.

'What is this?' the magistrate yelled, the remaining scraps of meaningless records in his hands. 'What have you done? I'll have you both reported -'

Li Bai opened one lazy eye and cut him off mid-screed. 'I pose a better question: what have _you_ done?'

Li Bai sat up, yawning enormously, as Du Fu scrambled to his feet, wondering how to mitigate a situation he did not yet regret causing.

The magistrate's face was very red. Li Bai, grunting and middle-aged, knelt and pushed himself properly upright. He reached for his few personal belongings, and - to Du Fu's great surprise - unwrapped dirty rags from around what turned out to be a sword.

'Do you confess,' Li Bai asked, sluggishly holding up the sheathed blade as he pointed it at the magistrate, 'to egregious acts against the people whom you are meant to serve?'

The magistrate gaped at him. 'I do _not_ -'

He did not - or rather, could not - finish his sentence. Li Bai's blade whispered; the magistrate did not have time to yell. Blood splattered prettily on the scattered papers, the crimson very brilliantly red against the cream background.

Du Fu looked down at the dead magistrate, and then up at Li Bai cleaning his sword.

'I am the crazy one,' Li Bai said before Du Fu could speak. 'I am the insane wandering poet, unliked by everyone and unable to behave.' He bowed before Du Fu: the most humbling thing Du Fu had ever or would ever witness. 'Clean up this mess, Official Du, then blame everything on me. I will be gone by noon.'

* * *

The last official report Du Fu ever wrote described the actions of the magistrate of Hu village, who had grown so corrupt that the people rose up against him. The magistrate was killed while attempting to cover up his crimes; the murderer was not one of the villagers, but rather a wandering errant. No one could track the man down.

So written, Du Fu submitted the report and left the village. Without returning to the capital of Luoyang, it is said he sold all his worldly possessions and bought, instead, a sword.

**Author's Note:**

> I handwaved a good amount of history and nomenclature proper here, but this is nominally set around 744 C.E. Egregious references to Mozi and the rectification of names is about the extent of my subject matter "expertise"; the wandering through poetry I accredit to lnhammer's amazing prompts.
> 
> The amazing (free online!) [Poetry of Du Fu](https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/246946) by Stephen Owen is an astounding opus that was v. helpful to my Tang-clueless self. The footnote to the quoted poem in the front matter is particularly useful:
>
>> This is presumed to be the earliest of Du Fu’s poems to the older poet Li Bai 李白 (701–762), who at this point had been relieved of his position as a Hanlin Attendant (politely represented in this poem as Li Bai’s “escape”). Shortly thereafter Du Fu was to go off east to the region around Kaifeng (Liang), where he had the company of Li Bai and Gao Shi 高適 (701–765).
> 
> The thought experiment of Du Fu's draws from 茅屋為秋風所破歌/Song of My Cottage Unroofed By Autumn Gales (opting for the translation from http://www.chinese-poems.com/d08.html), particularly the last bit: 安得广厦千万间  
>  大庇天下寒士俱欢颜  
>  风雨不动安如山  
>  呜呼何时眼前突兀见此屋  
>  吾庐独破受冻死亦足  |  If I could get a mansion with a thousand, ten thousand rooms,  
>  A great shelter for all the world's scholars, together in joy,  
>  Solid as a mountain, the elements could not move it.  
>  Oh! If I could see this house before me,  
>  I'd happily freeze to death in my broken hut!  
> ---|---


End file.
